Version

[Matthew Skala]

On Mon, 12 Oct 1998, Chris Wiegand wrote:
> mail client that doesn't support the inline pgp (the "ascii armor" mentioned at
> the top, I believe), and most support the PGP/Application if they support PGP

I think it's unfortunate that people (notably Werner) are deprecating
non-MIME "ASCII armour" format, because that attitude seems to limit GPG
to email.  Yes, MIME is probably the best thing to use for signing email
messages.  But I often use GPG or PGP to sign documents that aren't email
messages.  How about a contract or some other kind of legal notice?  I
often want to create a file with clear text and a signature in it, that
will be printable and be a single file and not particularly an email
message.  I could do a detached signature thing, but then I have two files
floating around that I have to keep together, in order to represent the
signed document that I see as a single object which should fit in a single
file.  Also, the detached signature isn't printable unless I ASCII-armour
it, which brings us full circle.

If you're forcing everyone to use MIME, it appears that what I have to do
is format my document as an email message with a MIME attachment.  This
seems non-optimal.  A MIME message doesn't look very good when read as a
text file with any kind of software that isn't a MIME user agent.  The
original PGP clear-signature format, despite its problems, is clearly
comprehensible when viewed without software that understands it.  It seems
to me that for this kind of non-email purpose, the PGP format is not
broken and does not need to be fixed with MIME. 

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